Ignore the Violent Rhetoric of the Man in Front of the Camera: Meltdown with Keith Olbermann, Part 60

David Forsmark is the owner and president of Winning Strategies, a full service political consulting firm in Michigan. David has been a regular columnist for Frontpage Magazine since 2006. For 20 years before that, he wrote book, movie and concert reviews as a stringer for the Flint Journal, a midsize daily newspaper.

Keith Olbermann continued to make a big deal out of Sarah Palin’s harmless—even clichéd—target map for Congressional districts, even as he protested that he “never” implied it was the cause for the shooting.

OLBERMANN: [to Palin] Madam, you area clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation.

Here is the first part of that rant, probably all you will want to take:

As I pointed out in a post at the time, while the phrase “clear and present danger” was first used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as a legal reason to suppress speech in wartime (and even to consider it treasonous) today It’s more commonly used as a justification for lethal force—usually military–against an imminent threat to the nation. John F. Kennedy famously used it in his speech to the nation at the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

OLBERMANN:Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.

Now, Keith wants to not only ignore the inflammatory rhetoric from his side while pretending common parlance on the other is what it most assuredly is not—his network is helping him cover it up.

Check out this video of Olbermann and Howard Fineman pretending that “no one” has accused Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh of any connection to the shooting. (Fineman comes in at the halfway point.)

To disprove this ridiculous premise, I was going to go through Chris Matthews transcripts for the week and count the times Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh are mentioned—but MSNBC has not posted a transcript of its prime time commentary showssince before the Tuscon shootings.

That delay of over a week, is about 6 days longer than usual. Generally transcripts are posted by mid-afternoon the following weekday.

In a way, I don’t blame them, they should be ashamed. Particularly of Chris Matthews. The saying goes that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. At least Keith is paying that tribute– in spades. Matthews doesn’t even bother.